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Mulder and Scully back together for the big screen on the trail of mysterious goings-on |
Ex life has gone a bit stale
THE X FILES: I WANT TO BELIEVE
Directed by Chris Carter
Certificate 15
IT’S been some time since the X-Files left our screens, and, although I am sure sci-fi fans will welcome them back, the time off has not done the writers of the series any favours.
This woolly minded nonsense fails comprehensively. It does not have enough of a wow factor about it. There are no cosmic puzzles for ex-FBI crank-call chasers Mulder and Scully to unravel. Instead our pair of crack-pot crime fighters are faced with an odd kidnapping case or two with none of that lights-in-the-sky stuff that made the X-Files a hit.
We learn that the Mulder-Scully partnership has been broken for some time: Mulder is in hiding, wanted by his own employers, the FBI, while Scully is working in a church hospital called the Our Lady of Sorrows.
But when an FBI agent goes missing and a psychic claims he has seen visions of her, the duo are back on the team.
There is so much that just does not work. A sub-plot brings forward awful, shallow hand-wringing about medical ethics. Every time anything related to this comes on screen you want to go round pulling out the plugs on all the life-support machines at Scully’s do-gooding Christian hospital.
Scully can save the life of a boy with a terminal brain disease if she can persuade the family to allow her to do some kind of revolutionary and incredibly painful stem-cell operation on him. (An operation so revolutionary our heroine finds out about it by Googling the research, printing it off and then going in with the scalpel. It’s a stupid aside and, incredibly, considering what little else is going on in this film, detracts from the main storyline.)
There are glimpses of what this could have been: as Mulder and Scully wait to meet FBI agents, they are confronted by the faces of George W Bush and Edgar Hoover. They turn and look at each other, as if to say: “Hell, are we on their side? We’re better off out of it!”
But rather than follow these themes through, we have some clichéd baddies doing bad stuff involving cutting off parts of unfortunate people’s anatomies. None of why this is necessary or explained. It’s a plot with so many gaping holes, Mulder and Scully should have been sent to investigate what happened to the writers.
Is there anything worthwhile in this mess? The pair have a hint of John Steed and Emma Peel about them – they work well together, and that will make X-fans happy. But this doesn’t stop the whole shebang being immensely frustrating.
Chris Carter has missed a trick. When you have the gamut of conspiracy nonsense at your fingertips and an audience who want to watch silly stuff about alien abductions and other such goings-on, why cast Billy Connolly as a child-abusing priest who has fuzzy visions which lead the FBI to mangled limbs?
Chris Carter has managed to turn the big screen into the small screen. If this were an episode of X-Files, it would not be one to grace your DVD player. |
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